Cultural access and effects on the health and social participation of people with disabilities. The Italian case, ID125, XIX International Forum ‘Le Vie dei Mercanti’ World Heritage and Design for Health.

Not everyone has equal access to culture: significant barriers exist for consumers, amateurs and professional contributors. People with disabilities may face barriers due to the inaccessibility of cultural premises, venues or contents. People in wheelchairs for instance cannot attend a concert if the only way into a hall is up a flight of stairs. Lack of access to cultural sites reduces the ability of people with disabilities to enjoy them fully. According to the approach first proposed by Sen (1999), capability building causes individuals to improve their level of self-determination, with a positive impact on healthserving habits and practices. Both cultural access per se and capability building – which is naturally associated to it – contribute to subjective well-being in a positive way. While this by-product of cultural participation is mostly unintentional, it may however be turned into a new instance of the welfare policy once properly recognised as a systematic spillover effect of cultural participation on individual and social health. Using ISTAT data for 2016, this work provides a measure of the degree of exclusion of people with disabilities from theatres and museums in Italy. Finally, it provides economic policy recipes aimed to reduce architectural, environmental, and social barriers hindering cultural access.